Blind Sunflowers (14 page)

Whenever I had the time, I went down onto the platforms to wait for a train. The dark tunnel was where the lepers hid, and the screech of the train wheels sounded to me like their screams as they were crushed beneath them. I was both attracted and terrified by those dark arches, because my world was situated at a crossroads where all kinds of evil could emerge. I know now that I was simply afraid.

My father came out of his hiding-place less and less often. He stayed inside even when we were alone in the flat. I used to like that,
because when I came home from school I could snuggle down beside him and share his silence. We sat for hours until my mother would disturb the quiet by offering me a bit of bread with some chocolate.

Everyone who was my age then could write a book about the ways we tried to make those gritty, dark grains more palatable: taking a drink of milk after you had started to chew it; dipping the bread in water so that the chocolate dust would solidify; or more usually, gnawing at it bit by bit, giving time for your saliva to be able to absorb it.

There came a time when my mother and I ate at the kitchen table while my father remained in the wardrobe to have his meal. He ate in a painfully slow, careful way, as if trying to avoid making any noise when he bit into the piece of rye bread. I felt guilty because the wardrobe began to smell like the metro and I was afraid it would end up attracting the lepers.

Despite all this, the fact that I went and came back from school on my own offered me lots of exciting opportunities. I could stop and look at all the shop windows I liked, and even stare at the
unfortunate
creatures I passed. I used to go down to the metro platforms in the mornings, on my way to school; on my way back, I would stop to stare at a stooped old woman who darned stockings with such meticulous care that had it not been for the ceaseless movement of her hands I could have sworn she was made of wood, like the saints on the church altar. After lunch, on my way back to school I ran down to the hell of the metro platforms once more, and after school I would take a route that invariably meant I walked along an esplanade we all knew as the old Bullring. It was there I discovered that Brother Salvador was following me dressed in ordinary clothes.

Piece by piece, the remaining furniture disappeared from the Mazo
household
. An ironmonger took the chestnut hat-stand, a friendly neighbour who lived in the attic and realised what was going on bought the sewing machine, a second-hand clothes seller paid next-to-nothing for the linen sheets and a crocheted bedspread that had been part of her grandmother’s dowry, and had been used only on her wedding night, that of Elena’s mother, and on her own. It still reeked of passion and mothballs. Elena had given a matching bedspread to her daughter when she fled with the
adolescent
poet just before the end of the war. The dining-room table was too big for anyone to want it, but the typewriter was bought by a bookkeeper at the Hispano-German company for whom Elena did translations.

Her fear that Ricardo would fall ill added a further sense of urgency to their plans to flee. Every single one of his friends had died or gone into exile, so there was no one to help them should his depressed state turn into something more serious.

They had collected almost enough money to be able to leave, but the desolate, empty house seemed to be closing in all round Ricardo. He did not even come out of the wardrobe to sleep. The boy, who no longer went to school, spent hours with him reading passages from Lewis Carroll to try to make him smile. Whenever the lift stopped at the third floor, he stopped reading. Then came a day full of silences and empty gaps when somebody rang their doorbell, waited in vain for a reply, and then pressed the bell insistently in a way that had all their hearts in their mouths. The subsequent banging on the door and a voice shouting in the stairwell set their escape routine into motion, even though they were going nowhere: Ricardo shut himself in the wardrobe, Lorenzo slipped into the kitchen, and Elena tidied her hair before sliding back the bolt. It was Brother Salvador, dressed in ordinary clothes but dishevelled and wild-looking: he froze as he saw how astonished Elena was at his noisy insistence.

‘I’ve come to see Lorenzo. How is he?’

I now regret the fact that I never told my parents Brother Salvador was following me, because the day he came to visit it caught them unawares. He was kicking at the door and making such a racket that
my mother had to let him in. There was almost no furniture left in the flat because strangers were taking it all away for reasons I did not dare ask but which I thought must have to do with their poverty rather than ours.

Brother Salvador swept in like a whirlwind, calling for me the whole time until he found me in the kitchen pretending to read
Alice in Wonderland
. He asked how I was feeling, snatched the book from my hands and immediately gave it back, then asked me point-blank if he could speak with my mother alone.

For many years afterwards I was overcome with remorse at doing nothing more than call on the lepers to come and devour this dervish attacking my mother, because when I came running in a panic in response to her screams, I was in time only to see my weak, powerless father throw himself on Brother Salvador as he sat astride her, while she desperately tried to protect her face from the
stinking
breath of this pig slobbering at her neck. My father had left his wardrobe.

Shrieking something unintelligible, Ricardo flung himself on Brother Salvador. The cleric managed to scramble to his feet with the other man clinging on his back. He had no idea what was going on. He struggled free from this apparition who had his hands clasped round his neck as though trying to strangle him, and with a single blow sent his attacker
literally flying across the room. For a brief moment, he seemed more dumbfounded than angry. He turned to Lorenzo who was standing in the doorway and asked him:

‘Who is this man?’

‘He’s my father, you bastard!’ screamed Lorenzo. He ran over to Elena, who had burst into a fit of heart-rending sobs and was crawling over to help her husband.

At this point, Brother Salvador began shouting at the top of his voice for the police, and started to edge his way back along the corridor, arms outstretched as though trying to ward off a legion of demons.

Despite feeling so weak and helpless, Ricardo finally managed to struggle to his feet, pushing off his protesting wife and son. As soon as he realised he could walk, he disappeared down the corridor after the deacon, who had flung open all the windows and was shouting for someone to go and fetch the police.

Little by little, faces appeared behind lace curtains at the courtyard windows, but none of them opened: nobody wanted to risk this madness invading their own home.

I am not sure now what I remember, because although I can see my father straddling one of the window-frames in the corridor, and can hear him saying goodbye to us in a soft, calm voice, my mother says he plunged into the void without a word.

Ricardo hesitated only a moment before flinging himself down into the courtyard he had protected himself from for so long. As he slipped from the window ledge, he took the time to glance back at Elena and his son with a sad smile, like someone departing on a long journey.

This is the end of my confession, Father. I shall not be returning to the monastery, but will try to live as a Christian outside the priesthood. If God’s mercy will allow it, absolve me. I will be one of his flock, because from now on I will be nothing more than another blind sunflower among the multitude.

Alberto
Méndez
(Madrid 1941-2004) studied in Rome and graduated in Literature and Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He later worked for both Spanish and international publishing companies.
Blind Sunflowers
was awarded the Sentenil Prize (2004), the Critics’ Prize and the National Prize for Literature (2005) and was serialised in
The New Yorker
in 2006.

Nick Caistor
is a British writer who has translated more than thirty books from the Spanish, including authors such as Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Marsé and Eduardo Mendoza. In 2007 he was awarded the
Valle-Inclán
Translation Prize for his English version of
The Sleeping Voice
by the Spanish author Dulce Chacón.